Freja Bäckman

Menu

I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer is a body of work that has grown as a collective effort. Following the origin of the word concert – to contest, question, dispute (with) as well as agreement in action. IwtIcwlabd has been shaped by public workshops and through improvisation sessions with a group of bass players and the performers chopping wood.

Elis Hannikainen moves through their videography between the materials in the installation and the performers in a rehearsed choreography, thus having an inconspicuous presence in the space. Manuela Schininá has created the sound design for the installation specifically for this setting, based on live recordings done at District Berlin earlier this year, where a concert (performance / installation) also took place.

I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer is a body of work that has grown as a collective effort. Following the origin of the word concert – to contest, question, dispute (with) as well as agreement in action – the iteration of IwtIcwlabd at District is a concert in the forms of a performance and an installation.

Acting in concert together, three figures chopping wood and five figures playing the electric bass make sound with the space, for what and who is in it. The space answers with lights fading into night, with colours, porosities, translucency, movements in fabrics and textures and places for the bodies to rest, to listen, to feel and imagine. Alluring for responses through murmurs and silences, with heartbeats, pleasure, alienation, repulsion maybe, with ways of doing time and dreaming.

A loner melting in to their surroundings. Invisible for the one not knowing what to look for. Chopping wood out of pure enjoyment. Growing in the light. They have made it their world. Under covers they spend their week. Lingering in the threes they find each other. The rhythmic beating brings them together. The experience is one they can only have alone. Filtering through the foliage.

They call it work. They find a common rhythm. They work (it) out. They take time to do this. They wonder if it is pr-oduction. They know the rules. They say it’s violent. They find them selves in stagnation. They a- scape. They are not reveling what is invisible. They know their abilities. They call it a repetitive motion. They make the rules. They say it does matter what stories they tell.

June 2nd until June 8th 2017
7 days, 7 sessions, limited to one person per session
Performance / Installation at Third Space in Helsinki

The No play Feminist Training Camp took place in May and June 2016 in nGbK in Berlin. The publication is an outcome of a collective process of editing and writing done by the working group; Clara López Menéndez, Elis Hannikainen, Enna Gerin, Ernest Högner, Freja Bäckman, Vappu Jalonen, together with Bogg Johanna Karlsson through transcribing audio recordings, remembering, negotiating and storytelling. It is an assembly of materials from the No play Feminist Training Camp.

The radical right wing or what we consider neo-fascists are being legitimized in parliaments all over Europe, immigration has been made the scapegoat of the financial economic crisis, and fear and ‘security’, as understood by conservatives, seem to be the main political engines dictating the discourse. The alarming developments in the political landscape and the speed of those increased the urgency of working out what our feminist practices can do.

“Even when we say “everyone” in an effort to an all-inclusive group, we are still making implicit assumptions about who is included and so we hardly ever overcome what Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau so aptly describe as “the constitutive exclusion” by which any particular notion of inclusion is established”
– Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

How do we act together in a world that isolates us? What exclusions are we still performing, when we create spaces and possibilities for working, learning or just being together? And what are the (in-)visible mechanisms of opening and closing spaces?

The project in Node Space creates a framework for coming together and is part of the seminar “Theoretical Frameworks for Curating and Mediating Art” by Nora Sternfeld. When thinking about how we negotiate when working together and how borders are established, the act of the building, the physical creation of the space also becomes important. The space is accessible but not without a deliberate attempt at entering it. The fence we have to cross, when we enter is the visible reference to the borders of the institution – which, as every border are usually felt by some and (almost) invisible to others. It means both the concrete space at the Art Department of Aalto University as well as the art institutions we are talking about as part of a theoretical framework for curating and mediating art.

The Bright Lights of the Institution
19.10.–15.12.2016, NODE Space, Helsinki

A framework for being together by Freja Bäckman
built together with Heidi Lunabba and Karolina Kucia
Curated by Nora Sternfeld in collaboration with Darja Zaitsev

the Partisan café is an educational/performative/artistic practice as a coffee house in the Museum of Burning Questions – a Para-Museum realised in collaboration with the artist Isa Rosenberger – and one performative platform of the freethought infrastructure project at Bergen Assembly.

Located in the occupied historic fire station of Bergen the Partisan café is host as much as guest. It is a shared space and a contact zone. As educators and café workers we think about radical hospitality. As guests of the resident firefighters we think about reciprocities and commonalities.

the Partisan café borrows its name directly from “the Partisan coffee house” – a space for gatherings, conversation and debate in London Soho in the late 1950s, organised by the New Left. Our use of the name is not nostalgic but an actualisation: With burning questions of today, we relate to it and appropriate it.

the Partisan café is related to a choice: partisan instead of participant. As “participation” has become a main engine of neoliberal transformation, formulating and taking up dissident stances is necessary. Rather than interacting within prescribed situations, we choose to build situated knowledges and actions.

We consider our educational work – as much as our artistic, performative and/or curatorial actions – as an organic intellectual practice. We work actively against the unacceptable choice between either marginalisation or neoliberalisation of education in the cultural field. We practice our educational work differently.

Bergen, March 2016

(from the Partisan café post-manifesto)

Image: Linn Heidi Stokkedal

“The café is run by seven educators/performers/café workers. Six of us are contracted to work 37.5 hours a week.”

This was my working suit for the whole time of the Partisan café Bergen in September 2016. Marking when my scedualed working hours started I put on the suit, taking it off when the shift was over.

A message from the future is warning us that time is running out. In the past years Europe’s colonial continuities and deeply rooted fascist practices have come to the fore in ever more frightening ways. Resistance is now crucial. We urgently need to revive old and develop new feminist and anti-fascist strategies of resistance and survival.

What training do we need?No play proposes a structure, a temporal, spatial and social architecture that turns the exhibition space of nGbK into a resource, a site of activity and exchange in the shape of a Feminist Training Camp.

The Training Camp stems from a queer understanding of feminism with a strong emphasis on grassroots models of collective organization, knowledges based in lived experience and the handling of daily oppressions. A space for disagreement and negotiation that can create a situated public considered political. For this, an intersectional understanding of how categories such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexual orientation are intertwined in oppressive power structures is necessary.